Effective Business Communications in the Modern World

Just like learning "joined up" writing, joined up, effective and integrated communications are a concept needing to be learnt by businesses of any size. The Internet has opened up greater means of communications and businesses need to ensure their messages are communicated across all of them. In many ways the new integrated communications mantra being adopted is old hat, as PR professionals have always understood the value of ensuring consistent messages are relayed across all channels to reach the desired audience, it's just there are so many available channels now and the public has adapted with gusto to the Internet communications revolution.

One communications area that's critically important, yet often neglected, is internal and employee-based communications. Businesses that adopt effective two-way communications strategies are often more profitable, and, it goes without saying, that organisations with defined objectives and strategies need to ensure all employees are aware and working off the same page. Of course, communicating with employees is different to the communications businesses make to the outside world, but internal social media is playing a larger part in this arena and creating employees with heightened brand awareness and more commitment to their place of work.

PR professionals working for major corporations often set up their own "war rooms" to monitor social media activity and analyse a wide range of chats and tweets happening in real time. Typically, this can consist of a 40-person team manning the LG advertising push during Super Bowl. Although many major companies are moving away from this "war room" ethos and on to providing their own news room type service, operating 24 hours of the day and constantly monitoring social media chats. Most of the major brands are finding their content does not naturally rise to the top of searches any longer, so are needing to take a step back to analyse communications and work on their integrated messages a little harder.

When it comes down to effective communications within the modern world, PR professionals now tend to head up a multi-disciplinary team of experts. This way all the available skills of an organisation are targeted at providing communications across all available channels, whether they happen to be Internet based or off line. The purpose of communicating this way is to set up a dialogue with potential customers and consumers and maintain that audience by providing beneficial communications. This can work in a number of ways, but for seasoned PR teams, it effectively means taking on a multi-disciplinary team of workers with abilities to handle social media, content generation, SEO experts, web design and graphic design personnel.

One major challenge for any PR Manager tasked with maintaining and enhancing effective communications is keeping a unified communication plan and integrating the diverse team that's tasked with ensuring all business communications are integrated in every possible manner.